1. Technical Field
Disclosed systems and methods relate to the display and manipulation of the display of digital character strings where the length of the character string extends beyond the width of a desired output display.
2. Description of the Related Art
The proliferation of mobile computing has radically altered the computing landscape. Crucial to the rise of mobile computing are the ever-expanding capabilities of these smaller, more mobile devices. As users interact more with the devices, they have come to expect that these devices perform more complex tasks and activities. Tasks and activities previously reserved for desktop, and even laptop computers, are now being performed using cellular telephones (e.g., smartphones) and tablet computing devices.
For example, the ability to perform tasks and activities such as browsing stored files, receiving and transferring stored files, as well as renaming stored files—tasks normally reserved for operating systems on desktops and laptops—are now being demanded by mobile users. The rising complexity of stored data accessed by mobile devices, however, parallels the increasing complexity of the applications and tasks performed by these devices. Accordingly, file names for attachments, media files, and document files have come to be very descriptive, and thus frequently very long.
Viewing long file names on mobile devices, however, is a challenge. The viewable display on a mobile device is always ultimately constrained by the physical dimensions of the entire device. Thus, the biggest advantage and benefit of a mobile computing device—its size—very quickly becomes a severe disadvantage and hindrance when viewing highly descriptive file names.
Mainstream smartphones today use four- or five-inch diagonal screens at most. Indeed, quite a few brands use smaller screens as well. While the screen sizes are generous in comparison to the screens of mobile phones in the past, these screens are only a fraction of the size of desktop and laptop monitors. Accordingly, reviewing long file names is often a troublesome and cumbersome affair.
In order to compensate, mobile devices employ a variety of techniques to show at least a portion of a long file name. For example, some devices may cut-off long file names at the right-hand edge of the screen. In other words, these devices display only the first portion of the file name onscreen, while leaving the remainder of the file name off-screen. Alternatively, some devices employ different methods of truncation to narrow the long file name to the width of the screen. The most popular forms of truncation generally omit characters at either the front, middle or end of a file name using ellipses.
Mobile devices and smartphones also often lack the ability to manipulate the file name as displayed. This further hinders the viewing of long file names on smaller screens since cut-off file names and conventional methods of truncation often obscure distinguishing information.
Therefore, there is a need to provide more convenient systems and methods for displaying and manipulating the display of long digital character strings where the length of the character string extends beyond the width of a desired output display. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that overcome these and other deficiencies of the related art.